Despite the challenges of embarking on the journey to the cloud, most companies continue to persist on its adoption.
The results of a recent survey by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) on cloud usage by enterprise IT found that many organisations have been less successful than expected in capitalising on the benefits of popular public cloud platforms. In fact, CIOs have experienced technical hurdles, pricing challenges and unexpectedly high operational costs.
Conducted in April this year, the survey polled more than 400 IT professionals around the world, who were asked to comment on their experiences with public cloud IaaS providers.
Yet the results also showed that the respondents believed the perceived benefits outweighed the risks, and that moving to the cloud was being driven by the need for business agility and speed.
This survey, like many of the others undertaken in recent times, underlines the confusion in the market when it comes to CIOs being able to reap real benefits from cloud computing, regardless of whether they are opting for a public, private or hybrid approach.
"Local businesses are tired of all the hype and the confusion. They want practical examples of how to implement solutions that address their business pain, drive cost down and profit up, and do so in a contractually sustainable way. Many vendors are positioning themselves as cloud providers, yet in reality they offer just a hosting environment. Local companies want more than that - without compromising the speed and flexibility required to thrive in a fast-moving and competitive market," says Fay Humphries, events programme manager at ITWeb.
ITWeb's third annual cloud computing conference, to be held in Johannesburg in September, will assist C-level executives and other senior IT and business decision-makers to unpack the issues and successfully switch to the cloud. Among the topics to be covered at this year's event are how best to negotiate cloud contracts, budgeting and cost optimisation in the cloud, using cloud computing to regain business agility, and an in-depth look at the relevant security considerations. Several case studies will give practical advice on how some SA corporates navigated their way into the cloud.
Click here to find out more about the ITWeb Cloud Computing Summit 2014 and register.
Share